Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

encouraged lounging, shall we say, as broad marble stairs led down to a sunken area in the middle that had been quartered, the sections separated by catwalks that met in the middle at a circular stage equipped with a stripper pole. One quarter was a deep koi pond intended for swimming
au naturel
, another was a sumptuous spa, and another was a shallow tub filled with thin red liquid that I guessed was melted gelatin; it was probably meant for Jell-O wrestling but had with neglect dissolved into a wretched little fuck-puddle. The final quarter, roughly catercorner from me, was of a similarly exploitative nature; it was a mud-wrestling pit, and it was occupied. Not by wrestlers or anything human or Fae but rather by the manticore we’d seen guarding the Old Way at Dubringer Moor. He was chained with thick steel cables to three different pillars on the far side of the room. I froze and watched him; his eyes were closed, head resting on his front paws. Perhaps I’d surprised him in a nap? Or perhaps he was dead. The outline of his ribs was showing underneath his red pelt, and while it was unlikely that he had died of starvation in the three days since we’d seen him in Germany, it was possible. Dying of thirst would be more likely if he had been chained here all that time. Something had to be wrong with him; I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t have heard or smelled me long ago if he were hale.
    I looked at him through my faerie specs and saw that he still had an aura; he wouldn’t have one if he were dead. So he was sleeping or pretending to sleep—or truly unconscious.
    If nothing else, he represented proof that Midhir and Grundlebeard had been involved in our hunting.
    And the proof that he represented a mortal threat was also plain: Small piles of ashes dotted the room, mute markers testifying to the death of numerous faeries.
    Prudence and a profound disability to move quickly dictated that I should simply try to find another way out rather than hop across in front of him, chained or not, so I turned around and spent ten minutes discovering that the path through Midhir’s sex room was the only practical exit. Past the selkie alcove, the architecture afforded nothing but another couple of unoccupied bedrooms. I toyed with the idea of laboriously unbinding the substance of a wall so that I could squeeze through the hole into the proverbial sunset, but there was some bad juju about it in the magical spectrum—either a ward or a trap, I wasn’t sure which. It was advanced binding of the sort the Tuatha Dé Danann were capable of, but I didn’t know if it was Midhir’s work or the work of whoever killed him. The bindings were tightly coiled, like the ones Aenghus Óg had placed on the mind of the late Tempe police detective Darren Fagles; if I tried to unbind them, it would set off an alarm at the very least, though I wouldn’t be surprised if something more violent happened. Insane as it sounded, I thought it best to risk the sleeping manticore. I might be able to sneak by him, but there was no way I could fight off anyone summoned by an alarm.
    Returning the way I had come, I nervously filled my bear charm once more before stepping onto the marble and then employed my lopsided pogo dance to reach thefirst pillar. The manticore hadn’t moved. It still lay motionless in the mud.
    Lacking the luxury of time—my magic was steadily draining now due to the camouflage spell—I hopped to the next pillar in three bounds and paused to check on the manticore. Motionless still.
    I had a much larger space to cross now. Though I was tackling the short width of the room rather than the length, it was still a damn big room and the pillars were clustered at the corners of it. A matching pair to the two on my end awaited me perhaps thirty feet away, and it was behind those pillars—or, rather, to the left of those pillars on the north wall—that the kitchen doors waited; beyond them, straight ahead on the east wall, was the door to a mystery room. It was a long way for a one-legged, one-armed dude to go without any support, but I didn’t have much choice. Taking a deep breath and praying to the gods below, I pushed off from the pillar and lunged forward, hoping I didn’t wipe out.
    The manticore woke when I was halfway across. The eyes snapped open, wide and alert, and searched for me. Though I was camouflaged, it wasn’t perfect invisibility, and he was able to spot my movement if not my clear outlines. No doubt he